We wrote about Kijiji (an eBay company) a year ago, a few months after they had made their first push into the US classified ads market. We quickly added an option to RealBird to make it a very easy, copy and paste operation to manually post your RealBird property advertisement to Kijiji. A few days ago I wrote about the main referral sources to the RealBird single property websites and I thought while I am at it, I follow up by revisiting Kijiji, Oodle and Backpage to see how they compare today, in terms of traffic and demographics. I selected these three classified ads portals, because they support similar verticals (not just real estate, like Trulia and Zillow) and because they are comparable in terms of overall traffic. I left out Craigslist from the comparison because it is still a magnitude larger in terms of traffic compared to these other important destination sites.

Update: Based on the reminder by Craig (see comments), it is important to note, that Oodle provides an API for 3rd party implementations and due to their partnerships with large online outlets like MySpace, listings syndicated to Oodle may reach way more actual people, than the Compete.com chart above would suggest. The point of this post is to show the growth of Kijiji over the last year and the importance of marketing real estate listings there as well.

Kijiji's own site claims 5 million uniques (vs the 2.5M+ reported by Compete), which is quite possible as Compete.com shows less unique visitors on RealBird sites than the number reported by our Google Analytics deployment.

Digging deeper into the stats (this time using quantcast.com for sub-domain traffic) one can see which markets (DMAs) are the most popular on these sites.

Kijiji.com

Backpage.com

Oodle.com

These charts are quite easy to read and the value of posting your RealBird listings to these classifieds sites is quite obvious, especially if your listing is in one of the top markets. (E.g. Washington, DC metropolitan area on Kijiji with over half a million people visiting a month or New York on Backpage)

Click the images above to dig deeper into the stats and see the monthly uniques in your DMA (Demographics Market Area) Also note that the demographics of these general purpose classified-ads site is different than Zillow's or Trulia's (focused on real estate only)

This post might be also a good reminder for all of our current RealBird members to take the time to manually post to Craigslist, Kijiji and Backpage (Oodle is an automatic syndication option). It takes only a few extra minutes per listing and you can potentially expose your property ads to hundreds of thousands of new prospects, out of which it only takes one actual buyer to sell the property :) Instructions and copy&paste code is provided in the RealBird member area.

The updated pie chart below shows the relative click-thru traffic from major real estate portals; i.e. consumer destination sites where RealBird listings are syndicated to (automatically or manually). It is based on the web analytics data of the last 200,000 click-throughs to RealBird single property websites:

Some notes and assumptions:

Craigslist is a manual distribution option for which we provide all the instructions and code. However, - due to the fact that it requires agents to manually post their listings after entering them in RealBird - the number of RealBird listings published on Craigslist is much less than the number of listings automatically syndicated to portals (Trulia, Zillow etc.). The traffic ratio of Craigslist would be way higher if all RealBird listings were published there as well by our members.

Trulia and Zillow consumer traffic is comparable (see Compete.com) but the click-through traffic from Trulia is almost three times as much. I suspect, that this is due to the fact, that Trulia has a big, prominent button "See more photos and details" linking to the RealBird property sites, while Zillow has a smaller, regular link on their property pages. In other words, Trulia's property page is more click-through friendly, hence more consumers actually end-up on the RealBird listing websites.

Since our number of syndicated listings is relatively small compared to the whole for-sale, active, US listing dataset, this chart does not implies in any ways the importance of those sites in terms of consumer traffic or the level of exposure your listing will receive. Statistically speaking, this chart can not be used as a base for making projections on traffic of the included portals. Our dataset is not a representation of such information. It only shows the distribution of traffic sources to the RealBird dataset. Use Compete.com or Quantcast.com for more accurate info on this.

Update: Based on the conversation with Sara from Zillow (see comments below), I'd like to emphasize it again, that the chart shows the ratio of referral traffic only, which does not have direct relationship with other metrics, like lead conversion etc. For example: one may receive more leads directly on the sites we syndicate to, without the user ever clicking-thru to the RealBird listing website (hence no referral traffic is tracked).

It is interesting to see that the click-throu traffic from Overstock.com is higher than the traffic from Vast.com, even though OverStock.com's real estate classifieds are powered by Vast.com. It is probably due to the fact, that Overstock has way higher traffic than Vast.com (See Compete.com for details)

We decided to include ActiveRain traffic that is not click-through referral, but impressions of RealBird widgets embedded on ActiveRain. It may artificially improved the relative rank though. We did so, because we wanted to emphasize the importance of posting listing widgets on ActiveRain, and because we could not find an easy way to separate the two types of web analytics data

I received a phone call from Ryan Spoon today, the manager of the US portal of Kijiji.com. Kijiji is eBay's classified ads portal. He informed us about the recent growth of Kijiji in terms of traffic and the number of posted classified ads.

I ran a report on Compete.com and found that there were a significant jump in Kijiji's traffic in June, 2007

Below are some charts comparing Kijiji with Oodle.com and Vast.com (I excluded Craigslist, because they are still way bigger, than anybody else in terms of traffic and would make the chart unbalanced and hard to read)

See Kijiji's jump (blue color) in terms of visitors in June-July:

The second chart below shows that in terms of engagement (pages/visit), Kijiji already passed the other compared sites:

The most interesting chart is the Daily Velocity: "Velocity reports the relative change in daily attention. Velocity is used to determine the relative growth of a domain over a particular timeframe or compared to other sites." Kijiji clearly has a momentum now:

For our real estate members, this is important because:

eBay seems to be very serious about building a high traffic classified site

With the Listing Publisher, it takes only a few minutes per listing to post to Kijiji and according to this data, it will most likely result in more prospective buyers looking at your properties

While consumer traffic is growing, early adapters benefit, because Kijiji is not yet saturated with real estate listings and you may very well be one of the few agents posting your listing in your area

So login or register with RealBird for free and do your listings a favor. Post it on Kijiji for additional traffic. With RealBird it will take you only a few extra minutes per listing to do so.